Top 40 Book Recommendations For Designers

The proverbial fact is that knowledge is power, that “the more you know, the better off you are.” Books are often known for changing people’s values, their worldview, and their ideas about design. In doing this we hope to focus attention on how books can be important and inspired sources of creativity, innovation, and invention. We spend time to find books that have been important, meaningful, and formative for others.

Leading up to today, we have collected some very informative food for your eyes. The following books serve as great blueprints for creatives, designers, entrepreneurs, artists, and the people who “create stuff.” All these books can help make you a better designer and business owner. We hope that this resource will be the first step you take to learn more about the subject you wish to conquer.

Designing Brand Identity

Whether your goal is to express a new brand or to revitalize an existing one, here is a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity. From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity is an essential reference for the entire process.

Enriched by new case studies showcasing successful world-class brands from Herman Miller and General Electric to the Obama ’08 election campaign, this Third Edition offers new insights into emerging trends such as sustainability and social networks.

Lord of the Logos: Designing the Metal Underground

Fans of underground black metal music call Christophe Szpajdel the Lord of the Logos. This eponymous book is a collection of hundreds of Szpajdel’s powerful logos, each of which captures the force of this genre anew. The hallmark of Szpajdel’s work is his surprisingly fluid combination of letters with visual elements from art movements such as art deco and art nouveau. But Szpajdel’s most important source of inspiration is nature: roots and trees as well as bats and other creatures.

The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newpapers, Magazines, and Books

Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop

For designers working in every medium, layout is arguable the most basic, and most important, element. Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user to not only be drawn in with an innovative design but to digest information easily.

Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules and see them applies to real-world projects.

Text reveals top designers’ work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Also included are historical overviews that summarize the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.

HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites

Every day, more and more people want to learn some HTML and CSS. Joining the professional web designers and programmers are new audiences who need to know a little bit of code at work (update a content management system or e-commerce store) and those who want to make their personal blogs more attractive. Many books teaching HTML and CSS are dry and only written for those who want to become programmers, which is why this book takes an entirely new approach.

The Lean Startup

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Color Design Workbook: A Real World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design

Since color is such a important part of graphic design, designers need the most up to date as well as the most fundamental, information on the subject to have the tools needed to use color effectively. From the meanings behind colors to working with color in presentations, this book provides readers with the vital information needed to apply color creatively and effectively to their design work. Readers also receive guidance on talking with clients about color and selling color ideas. The science behind color theory is also explained in easily understood language, and case studies are included to show the effects some color choices had on both their clients and consumers.

Poke the Box

If you’re stuck at the starting line, you don’t need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.

Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-–in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-–the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.”

Poke the Box just may be the kick in the pants you need to shake up your life.

Why We Buy – The Science of Shopping

Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty bestselling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture — full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail, which is taking place in the world’s emerging markets. New material includes:

• The latest trends in online retail — what retailers are doing right and what they’re doing wrong — and how nearly every Internet retailer from iTunes to Amazon can drastically improve how it serves its customers.

• A guided tour of the most innovative stores, malls and retail environments around the world — almost all of which are springing up in countries where prosperity is new. An enormous indoor ski slope attracts shoppers to a mall in Dubai; an uber luxurious Sao Paolo department store provides its customers with personal shoppers; a mall in South Africa has a wave pool for surfing.

War Posters – Weapons of Mass Communication

“A lush catalog… exquisitely conceived and rendered.”—The New York Times

This essential publication features a wide selection of the most eye-catching and iconic examples from the internationally renowned poster collection at the Imperial War Museum in London.

More than 300 superb full-color illustrations of hard-hitting propaganda and groundbreaking graphic art encompass unforgettable images such as Alfred Leete’s “Your Country Needs You” as well as documentary photographs and additional material drawn from the world of advertising.

Through these posters, James Aulich, an international expert on posters and graphic design, examines the social, political, ethnic, and cultural aspirations of America, Britain, Northern Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Covering topics as diverse as advertising in World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Germany and Occupied Europe in World War II, anti-nuclear campaigns, and Vietnam, the book is a comprehensive and invaluable resource for anyone interested in graphic design or modern history. 300+ illustrations